Jean and I lived less than two miles from Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado when that infamous shooting occurred. I was at work, and Jean was at a bus stop about two blocks away from the shooting. She saw personnel in fatigues with rifles running in a nearby field toward the school.

We live in Bailey now but were staying overnight at Jean’s parents’ place in Lakewood during, and about 12 miles or so from, the newly infamous Aurora shooting in the early minutes of last Friday, July 20, 2012.

Here are some random thoughts of mine on the Aurora tragedy:

1.) It takes only one person, for good or evil, to affect a nation.

2.) Citizens pull the strings of their elected representatives, not the other way around. The President moves to our citizens’ pain, as does the governor, the mayor, the members of Congress and the city officials–not the other way around. That’s why you saw President Obama, all of Colorado’s congressmen and many of our states elected officials in Aurora yesterday.

3.) “… the peace of God … passeth all understanding …” Phil. 4:7.

4.) “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Rom. 12:21.

5.) Regardless of all of the hindsight-rhetoric of people now saying that we need to pay more attention to those close to us who may seem dangerously troubled, and report them, the police will generally not respond until shots have been fired or blood has been spilled. Besides, we do not need to expand citizen surveillance.

Mental illness should absolutely become a priority of medical staff and lawmakers of this nation–indeed of our world at large–given the proliferation of causes for mental illness within a world seemingly gone mad and seemingly with no long-vision concern for advances in technology and weaponry that increasingly and exponentially allow what Alvin Toffler, in 1970, called “Future Shock” and what I would now term a “present and sophisticated madness.”

What exactly is the character of “The Joker” in the Batman series but a sophisticated and intelligent madman hiding behind his mask–a self-assured, clownish smile? Our society, now more than ever, allows for such a fictional character to seem to step out from behind the theatre screen and into a very painful reality, as just happened at the Aurora Century 16.

6.) Violence is not a joke. There are those in our society who justify violence, like the Occupy Wall Street practitioners who act just as smugly (burn cars, businesses, property; and injure law enforcers) out of an amused sense that they are more sophisticated and intelligent than those who don’t agree with them politically, and that they don’t have time for pleading their case non-violently. Violence is not a joke, whether a democrat, republican, liberal or conservative or whatever.

Predictions that multitudes of unmanned aircraft could be flying here within a decade are raising the specter of a “surveillance society” in which no home or backyard would be off limits to prying eyes overhead. Law enforcement, oil companies, farmers, real estate agents and many others have seen the technology that was pioneered on battlefields, and they are eager to put it to use.

It’s not just talk: The government is in the early stages of devising rules for the unmanned aircraft.

So far, civilian use of drones is fairly limited. The Federal Aviation Administration had issued fewer than 300 permits for drones by the end of last year.

Public worries about drones began mostly on the political margins, but there are signs that they’re going mainstream.

Jeff Landry, a freshman Republican congressman from Louisiana’s coastal bayou country, says constituents have stopped him while shopping at Walmart to talk about their concerns.

“There is a distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government,” Landry said. “It’s raising an alarm with the American public.”

Fear that some drones may be armed, for example, has been fueled in part by a county sheriff’s office in Texas that used a homeland security grant to buy a $300,000, 50-pound ShadowHawk helicopter drone for its SWAT team. The drone can be equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Randy McDaniel, chief deputy with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, told The Associated Press earlier this year his office had no plans to arm the drone, but he left open the possibility the agency might decide to adapt the drone to fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.

Earlier this year Congress, under pressure from the Defense Department and drone manufacturers, ordered the FAA to give drones greater access to civilian airspace by 2015. Besides the military, the mandate applies to drones operated by private companies or individuals and civilian government agencies, including federal, state and local law enforcement.

Below is a timeline created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of drone integration in the United States. See the larger image here.

(Image: EFF.org)

The military, which is bringing home unmanned aircraft from Afghanistan, wants room to test and use them.

But the potential civilian market for drones may far eclipse military demand. Power companies want them to monitor transmission lines. Farmers want to fly them over fields to detect which crops need water. Ranchers want them to count cows. Journalists are exploring drones’ newsgathering potential. Police departments want them to chase crooks, conduct search and rescue missions and catch speeders.

But concern is spreading. Another GOP freshman, Rep. Austin Scott, said he first learned of the issue when someone shouted out a question about drones at a Republican Party meeting in his Georgia district two months ago.

When Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, suggested during an interview on Washington radio station WTOP last month that drones be used by police since they’ve done such a good job on foreign battlefields, the political backlash was swift. NetRightDaily complained: “This seems like something a fascist would do. … McDonnell isn’t pro-Big Government, he is pro-HUGE Government.”

John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va., which provides legal assistance in support of civil liberties and conservative causes, warned the governor, “America is not a battlefield, and the citizens of this nation are not insurgents in need of vanquishing.”

Drone operators (Photo: Wikimedia)

There’s concern as well among liberal civil liberties advocates that government and private-sector drones will be used to gather information on Americans without their knowledge. Giving drones greater access to U.S. skies moves the nation closer to “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities,” the American Civil Liberties Union declared in a report last December.

An ACLU lobbyist, Chris Calabrese, said that when he speaks to audiences about privacy issues, drones are what “everybody just perks up over.”

“People are interested in the technology, they are interested in the implications and they worry about being under surveillance from the skies,” he said.

The anxiety has spilled into Congress, where lawmakers from both parties have been meeting to discuss legislation that would broadly address the civil-liberty issues. A Landry provision in a defense spending bill would prohibit information gathered by military drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court. A provision that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., added to another bill would prohibit the Homeland Security Department from arming its drones, including ones used to patrol the border.

Scott and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced identical bills to prohibit any government agency from using a drone to “gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a regulation” without a warrant.

“I just don’t like the concept of drones flying over barbecues in New York to see whether you have a Big Gulp in your backyard or whether you are separating out your recyclables according to the city mandates,” Paul said in an interview, referring to a New York City ban on supersized soft drinks.

He acknowledged that was an “extreme example,” but he added: “They might just say we’d be safer from muggings if we had constant surveillance crisscrossing the street all the time. But then the question becomes, `What about jaywalking? What about eating too many donuts? What about putting mayonnaise on your hamburger?’ Where does it stop?”

Calabrese, the ACLU lobbyist, called Paul’s office as soon as he heard about the bill.

“I told them we think they are starting from the right place,” Calabrese said. “You should need some kind of basis before you use a drone to spy on someone.”

In a Congress noted for its political polarization, legislation to check drone use has the potential to forge “a left-right consensus,” he said. “It bothers us for a lot of the same reasons it bothers conservatives.”

The backlash has drone makers concerned. The drone market is expected to nearly double over the next 10 years, from current worldwide expenditures of nearly $6 billion annually to more than $11 billion, with police departments accounting for a significant part of that growth.

“We go into this with every expectation that the laws governing public safety and personal privacy will not be administered any differently for (drones) than they are for any other law enforcement tool,” said Dan Elwell, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association.

Discussion of the issue has been colored by exaggerated drone tales spread largely by conservative media and bloggers.

Scott said he was prompted to introduce his bill in part by news reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has been using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska. The agency has indeed been searching for illegal dumping of waste into streams, but it is doing it with piloted planes.

In another case, a forecast of 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2020 has been widely attributed to the FAA. But FAA spokeswoman Brie Sachse said the agency has no idea where the figure came from. It may be a mangled version of an aerospace industry forecast that there could be nearly 30,000 drones worldwide by 2018, with the United States accounting for half of them.

Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of a congressional privacy caucus, asked the FAA in April how it plans to protect privacy as it develops regulations for integrating drones into airspace now exclusively used by aircraft with human pilots. There’s been no response so far, but Acting FAA Administrator Michael Huerta will probably be asked about it when he testifies at a Senate hearing Thursday.

Today is the third anniversary of the brutal and unnecessary killing of a nephew, Shawn, who was shot to death by police.

He had encountered the law previously for misdemeanors but nothing more serious. On this day, three years ago, he placed himself in the company of someone who had previously committed at least one fatal crime. They planned the armed robbery of a man with a car load of cellphones so they could sell the stash of technology that would most likely later be sold again for use in other crimes.

The theft went terribly wrong. It appears to this day that the police had staked out the affair. How else could they have been in pursuit in so little time? Shawn and his shithead companion ran over something that caused a flat tire, then ran from the car.

The police gunners could have targeted him in the legs and then stopped when he fell. Instead, they shot him multiple times in the back and legs. When a Flight-For-Life helicopter was called for, the police said no and asked for an ambulance, which had to make it there in afternoon traffic. Shawn bled to death. His shithead companion was wounded and captured and is now serving time. I wasn’t there, but that’s the story as I understand it to this day.

Even within the space of seconds, there’s time for reason. There’s a clear need for law enforcement, but there was no reason for the multiple kill shots. Sure, he was involved in a crime that involved a gun, someone else’s gun. I won’t justify the crime. What he did was wrong, and I believe in the absolutes of right and wrong. Excess force leading to the overkill of a twenty-three-year-old is also wrong.

Maybe it’s just that he was family. Maybe I’m hopelessly naïve to still believe in the virtue of reason, even within the space of seconds, especially among those who are trained to react in seconds.

At Columbine High School in April, 1999, it was just the opposite. SWAT team members were afraid to enter the school. I lived a handful of blocks from Columbine High at the time, and I walked to that memorial service, the sorrow of which will never leave me — the doves being released for each of the victims and hair-raising fighter jets thundering in and out of low-hanging rain clouds, almost close enough to touch. Those elite were trained to go in under those circumstances — and they stalled. In Shawn’s case, the police rushed to a quick and messy kill. Things are just so wrong so often.

Icy Sunrise - Spring 2010-SB

All of us have stories, good and bad. I have plenty of stories. Stories are important. They have to be told, sometimes over and over. Sometimes they stick, sometimes not. Sometimes they proliferate, most times not. There are storytellers of their own stories, and there are storytellers on behalf of those who have passed.

I’ve used up at least a handful of my “nine lives.” Once, I was with friends on a road trip to Austin, Texas. We were in a “beater” of a car on our way back north to Amarillo with cases of Budweiser in the trunk. We would down the beers and then relieve ourselves into the empty cans, throwing the full cans out of the windows. Even pigs showed more brains. I was about twenty years old then, sometime in 1975.

The driver began to swerve, at something like 70 MPH. He swerved to the left, then the right, overcompensating each time until landing in a side ditch and sliding forward with the car sideways. I was in the passenger-side back seat with a steel culvert coming at me on the other side of my window. We hit the culvert, which I was sure would flip our car over it. Instead, somehow, we bounced over and slid to rest on the other side.

Once upon another time, when I was eighteen, just two months out of High School, I was driving my brother’s early-1970s, BMW Bavaria that he had purchased while in the U.S. Army in Germany. He had it imported back to the U.S. and let me drive it on occasion. He trusted me.

I had been in the habit at that time of driving to Liberal, Kansas, where beer could be purchased at age eighteen. In Texas, you had to be twenty-one. I had two younger friends with me, and we were on our return trip to Texas from Liberal with a case of Budweiser “Tallboys.”

It was common to drink and drive back then in Texas, not near as enforced as today. My brother’s BMW would easily do 120 MPH on the straight, seemingly forever highways on the Texas plains. Fortunately, I was just accelerating as I left a small town for the open road. An older couple, in their seventies or eighties, pulled up to a side farm-road and braked at a stop sign. I saw them and continued forward. They looked at me, it seemed, but then they pulled forward.

I smacked them dead-center into the rear axle of their Cadillac at about 30-40 MPH. There were cuts and bruises to go around, but luckily that was all. I spent my one and only night in jail, and my brother’s BMW was totaled, its front end like a metal accordian. I’ve made lots of mistakes in life, none quite as eyeopening for me as those two. We’ve all made mistakes, and will continue to do so.

Here, There and Everywhere - Summer 2011-SB

Here are my three “morals” to this story, which I’ve told to younger members of my family, and which I consider at the pinnacle of the list of “wisdom” I’ve somehow managed to pick up in life.

1. There are three kinds of accidents: Those that go away almost immediately; those that go away after some time has passed; and those that never go away.

If you trip over something, then right yourself and quickly look around, seeing that nobody observed what happened, then you brush yourself off, walk away and no one but you knows.

The two accidents that I described above, I consider somewhere between the second and third kinds of accidents. Most of those involved are either dead now or have forgotten the whole thing, but both incidents left an indelible mark on my psyche that stays with me always when I’m either driving or placing myself into a car with another driver. I could easily have died in either accident, along with one or more of all the others.

My nephew Shawn, as good as his heart was, made the third kind of mistake, which will forever affect him, his family, his friends and anyone whose eyes happened to be on the horrible scene that day, three years ago, when he was “overkilled” by the police, lying there, no doubt wishing that he had chosen instead not to run, not to have placed himself in the car with his shithead friend, not to have wanted money so bad as to break the law for it until his short life was over and he could wish no more.

His two children will no doubt forever wish the same things that can never ever be. “Why didn’t you just stop and put your hands up, Shawn?” How many times have I asked myself that question?

2. Always think BEFORE you find yourself in the company of people you don’t know.

I remember once, back in the “hazy daze” of the 1970s, when a very good friend of mine drove me to a little house way out along dirt roads in the farmlands of Texas in order for him to acquire some exotic Mexican weed from someone that he knew but I didn’t. We arrived there, and I found myself in this “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”-style dump with pounds of pungent grass on a table, various well-used tools for weighing it, cutting it and bagging it, along with a visible variety of firearms. I remember being in a serious conversation with myself, basically asking “WTF was I thinking?”

The journey began with me climbing into a familiar car with a familiar good friend and ended with me in a dump of a lonely farmhouse somewhere out in the sprawling shadows of Texas. Luckily, my friend and I walked out of it, but not without wisdom that I’ve somehow carried with me to this day.

A co-worker of mine told me a story once about her and some girlfriends who had traveled down to Mexico for a vacation. They were on the beach in bikinis and saw some hot guys in swimsuits motioning to them from a small yacht just offshore. The guys wanted them to swim out and join them to party. They did. After arriving there, it didn’t take long for my friend to realize that even though things went well, and they lived to tell about it, it was an incredibly pig-stupid thing for them to have done, to have placed themselves into the confines of that boat with total strangers.

Shawn, to my understanding, had just met his shithead friend days before their attempted theft. The guy was a friend of Shawn’s girlfriend, and he placed himself in the guy’s company with blind trust. “I know about climbing into cars out of blind trust, Shawn, but with the intent of armed robbery? Why?”

Think of this in a political way, as well. When you pull the ballot crank in a voting booth, you’re essentially placing yourself in the backseat of a very big car with someone driving that you really don’t know much about at all. Pulling the crank is blind trust, even when you think you know who you’re placing in the driver’s seat. You can’t go through a whole life without placing yourself in some kind of backseat at some point. I’ve done it. We’ve all done it. In this political sense, you have to pull the crank for some driver. Blind trust, though, is never one’s friend. Reason is the only equalizer.

3. When working at a coal mine in Wyoming back in 1979-80, I had to take an OSHA safety class since I would be working around trucks the size of small houses with tires twice as high as a Chevy van, as well as other hazards. I learned something in that class that I still keep in mind thirty-two years later.

If you place a roller skate on a living room floor and leave it there, it’s an accident even though it hasn’t happened yet. If you pick it up when you first notice it, you’ve eliminated the accident from happening. It works the same way with a car tire that’s becoming bald. If you leave it, it’s bound to go flat when you least expect it – like when you’re on the highway doing 70, or 120 in a BMW. But if you fix it asap, then you’ve prevented it from happening.

The Nature of Accidents: An accident is not something that has already happened, but something that has potential for happening. If you nail it in its potential stage, then you’ve nailed it from happening.

Aspen Gold at Dusk - Autumn 2011-SB

The last time I saw Shawn was Christmas of 2008, three months before his killing. He was twenty-three, having been born three days before Thanksgiving of 2008. Shawn was someone to be thankful for, 100%. We have all made mistakes, and all of us have known terrible accidents.

I can’t say why I’ve come close to death in the past but lived, and Shawn didn’t. I don’t have that answer and never will. I was so shocked after the phone call came early the next morning, before sunrise. His death was so uncharacteristic of the young man that I knew.

He worked in a health food store at one time as a manager. I remember him telling me all about the benefits of certain vitamins and supplements. “I know what would be great for you, Uncle Steve,” he would say, concerned for my health, writing down some names. “Why don’t you try some of these for awhile?” There are lots of answers I just don’t have and never will.